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Date:      Sun, 17 Oct 1999 20:04:59 -0500
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
To:        Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net>
Cc:        FreeBSD-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: keyboards 
Message-ID:  <199910180104.UAA32768@nospam.hiwaay.net>
In-Reply-To: Message from Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net>  of "Sun, 17 Oct 1999 00:00:22 EDT." <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910162356270.3067-100000@picnic.mat.net> 

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Chuck Robey writes:
> On Sat, 16 Oct 1999, David Kelly wrote:
> 
[...]
> > Almost completely off topic: Noticed HP-2500CM is an ethernet/PostScript/
> > color/inkjet printer. Only $1500 or so.
> 
> Off topic, and it's also a *really* bad investment, unless the printer
> itself happens to be great (like if it was 2000 dpi, something like that).
> I used to have a printer myself that had an internal postscript
> interpreter, so that (1) it took 3 times longer to download files (they
> down load faster as PCL or some printer's native language) and they had to
> ability to use new updated postscript interpreters as they become
> available.  I can update ghostscript *very* easily, it downloads stuff to
> my printer qery quickly, it gives me a 1/4 of the problems that the
> printer-based interpreter gave me (postscript error pages instead of
> printed output).
> 
> A postscript printer is a bad deal.

Quite to the contrary, I buy nothing but Postscript printers. Haven't
tried HP's imitation-Postscript but its only a matter of time before we
try one.

Postscript *is* my printer's native language. Altho it also includes an 
HPCL-4 interpreter (written in Postscript, I suspect) built in.

I find printed postscript output generated by appropriate postscript
print drivers (such as those a Macintosh uses) download quickly, print
quickly, and print accurately. 

Strange that they print quickly as its not unusual for a Mac to generate
1MB per page if one prints Postscript to file. Older Mac postscript
drivers like to initialize the printer with a body of common
subroutines. When printing to file they included those routines. With
version 8.6 drivers the Postscript files appear to be smaller but I've
not bothered to disect one lately. Plus its been a very long time
(years) since I saw my Mac say it wanted to initialize the printer.

If the original material consists of GIF and JPEG files as is usually
the case with a web browser, then expanding and encapsulating that
binary data into postscript makes for a slow print job.


--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.




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